Sutton native working for USAID dies in DC fire

SUTTON 
A man with Sutton roots who was working in Washington, D.C., for the United States Agency for International Development died Tuesday night in a row house fire in the Bloomingdale area of northwest Washington.

Jeffrey A. Nedoroscik, 42, was found unconscious on the first floor of 1810 First St. N.W. after D.C. Fire and EMS and Metropolitan Police Department officers responded to the alarm, which came in around 7:15 p.m., police spokesman Officer Araz Alali said yesterday afternoon. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Officer Alali said investigators were still trying to determine the cause of death and the cause of the fire. Homicide investigators were brought in.

Neighbor Darrick Tucker snapped a picture of flames streaming out of the home after he tried to save the victim.

“So as I parked my car, I could hear people say that he came out and that he ran back in,” Mr. Tucker told ABC 7 News in Washington.

Mr. Tucker said he tried to go in after Mr. Nedoroscik, but the heat from the fire stopped him.

Mr. Nedoroscik graduated from Sutton High School in 1988 and from the College of the Holy Cross in 1992. He also studied political science at The American University in Cairo, Egypt, according to information on his Facebook page.

In 1997 he published a book, “The City of the Dead: A History of Cairo’s Cemetery Communities” (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey). The book centers on the impoverished people who live there, one of whom he befriended after a chance encounter.

Those who knew him well said it was characteristic of him to write about an unknown quarter of Cairo. In an interview with the Telegram & Gazette in 1997, his mother, former Sutton Town Administrator Patricia Nedoroscik, told of how he became friendly with armed guards stationed in front of government buildings in Cairo because he wanted to know if the guns had bullets. (It turned out they didn’t.)

“He’s very curious. He wants to know things most of us wouldn’t even think about,” she said in the interview.

Mr. Nedoroscik worked in international development with USAID and the U.S. government for the last 18 years, including serving as the supervisory executive officer for the USAID mission to Croatia a decade ago, and for the past two years as chief of compliance and oversight at USAID’s Washington headquarters.

In 2004 Mr. Nedoroscik received the Meritorious Honor Award from the U.S. ambassador to Croatia for his performance as acting embassy management officer in Croatia and received a certificate from the Inter-Agency United States Government Management Council in Washington, D.C.

“Jeffrey was a kind man,” his former roommate Henian Boone told ABC. “He was always giving. He shared his home. He opened his home to me.”

Mr. Boone added: “He’s traveled the world, he’s done a lot of great things and he will be truly be missed.”

His Mr. Nedoroscik’s sister, Laurie Salmon, said: “We’re all so extremely proud of the work that he did and the way that he represented Americans all over the world.”